Can You Hear This? CEF grants, hearing tests and hot dogs: GM Farcaster ep372

Clanker Ecosystem Fund Round 2 grants were announced this morning on @gmfarcaster! Congratulations to all the amazing Builders who have contributed to both Clanker and Farcaster ecosystems that were selected in this round. ⚒️ Congratulations to our Builder grant winner ($5000 usdc): @mattlee! 🎉 Your work on @tortmusic.eth plus all the other builds since the early Farcaster days led to this selection. We have 16 other grantees in the Sustainability, Fresh Clank and Activation categories. In no particular order, congratulations to: @bizarrebeast $1000 Sustainability Grant @jrf for Atlas $1000 Sustainability Grant @0xjudd.eth for LetterLoops $1000 Sustainability Grant @esdotge for BRND $1000 Sustainability Grant @pauline-unik & @tako-unik for Los Fomos $1000 Sustainability Grant @cashlessman.eth for Farcaster Pro (&others) $1000 Sustainability Grant (continued in next reply)

This morning on @gmfarcaster we announced the Creator Sprint grantees! 🎉 We had 71 applications and went through each one, selecting 5 video creators and 5 writers that will be creating and publishing new works about Clanker and the Clanker ecosystem over the next month. 📹 Congratulations to our Video Creator grantees: @afrochicks @anacarolina.eth @pauline-unik (Los Fomos) @rachelw @tinyrainboot ✍️ And to our Writers: @depressivehacks @diviflyy @nickysap @six @bradq @nounishprof will be adding you all to a group chat to answer any questions. The $500 usdc grant will be dispersed upon publication. Congratulations to all! Excited to see your work!

Farcaster I think can turn it's weakness into a strength. The weakness -- my weakness when onboarding people -- is that there are multiple hurdles you have to get a person over just to agree to try it out. Crypto alone is a huge hurdle. And everyone's exhausted and nobody wants another social account. But the strength is in how this is truly frontier stuff- tight wallet and app integrations into social media Is just so much smoother than plug-ins like metamask or anything that requires wallet connect. This is the superior crypto social experience. For the people who get the scene here, this place rules. We are here way more than X, for reasons. But for outsiders, they need a strong motivation to be here. Most people here for the crypto leave whenever the latest wellspring dries up. The social incentives are not there for them. For me as a builder and cryptoartist the incentive is clear - I'm in the arena trying things, I want to show my work and gain some public integrity. I liked what that guy I think Benny said in the @farcaster community call the other day about not wanting to see channels he can't participate in. I don't necessarily agree, but I can imagine a better social media platform where channels can be private, or at least not be shown on main. If channels could be quickly spun up for a group, it might be easier to onboard communities of people. Wouldn't it be nice to have a feed just for channels you follow? Just like we have for accounts we follow! I can't tell you the number of people I don't follow because they post certain apps or participate in certain communities that I just don't care to see. Even if I like what they say otherwise.

protocol developer updates > degen adding a snapchain validator: adds geographic diversity - mentioned as a priority during previous dev call (thanks @jacek for volunteering https://farcaster.xyz/jacek/0x5069fadb) > FIP to add non snapchain validators https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/272 all validator operators will also be added to snapchain github repo with write access

A pre-season dinger get ready …s3 https://www.logadog.xyz/dog/2080

we want onboarding new people to Farcaster to be better! if you've onboarded or onboarded someone else recently: what was the hardest part, what caused friction, and what would you change first? the more specific, the more useful.

Community Call happening in 20 minutes! agenda attached 👇 https://neynar.notion.site/389655195a8b80608b34f2927bf99e43

🌀Enter the NEON CLANKERVERSE!🌀 We’re launching an open art contest on @betrmint, powered by the @clanker ecosystem fund, with $2,000 in prizes up for grabs. THE BRIEF: Create a piece of art in any style or medium inspired by “Neon Clankerverse” (something that evokes both Clanker and BETR.) HOW TO ENTER: 🌀 Quote cast this cast 🌀 Include “Neon Clankerverse” in text 🌀 Submit before July 1 at 11:59 PM EST PRIZES: 🏆 Top 3 entries: $200 in $BETR each ✨ 17 additional standout entries: featured on BETRMINT + $75 each AI POLICY: AI can be used as a tool in the creative process, but preference will always be given to high-effort, handmade work. Let’s flood the timeline and let the neon art shine… Clank! Clank!

will use this opportunity to give a huge shoutout to @kenny (@poidhbot) for what they’ve been cooking with social bounties these past couple weeks. bounties are clearly having a moment on fc right now, and it shows. from world cup bounties to technical and creativity ones, the cef-funded bounties have kept farcaster culture alive. (pretty sure they even hit their highest rank on fc mini apps leaderboard last week too.) this is what fc culture is supposed to feel like. 🫡

As we get ready for round 2 /cef announcements, we'd love to hear from our round 1 grantees on how their grants have impacted their projects. And if you received an activation grant, share how you've used that, add links to any related casts or share your plans that are in the works! We know some folks just received their funds (it took some time for the tax stuff) so no worries if you're still in the planning stages. tagging our grantees - more in the next reply: @jake @toadyhawk.eth @netnose @atown @katkartel.eth @svvvg3.eth @darkoh.eth @burr.eth @plantsnft (and umm @kenny a summary will do -- please don't share EVERY link -- oh we see you! lol)

Ten or so years ago, I started an educational YouTube channel on a whim, based on a course I was teaching at the time. I made a video every day for a month and then decided I didn't enjoy the process of making videos enough so I set it aside. A few months ago, it crossed 300,000 subscribers, 8.7 million views, and 670,000 hours of content watched. Working with individual students always felt more impactful, but it's truly mind-boggling to think that people have spent 670,000 hours (76 years!!) listening to me teach. I don't really know how to think about this, except to be in awe of the internet and hope that I did a good enough job with the lessons to make their life better.

It's official, @farnalytics is going live in ~24hrs. I planned on having it go live today but at the last minute, i decided to add a new metric and also conduct more reviews to ensure that the app has little to no issues when it goes live. While we're waiting though, I'd like to shed more light on what Farnalytics actually is. Farnalytics (Similar to X analytics) is a miniapp that pulls publicly available data of your Farcaster profile, runs computations on said data and renders your social statistics. Some metrics you can expect to see include: → Follow/unfollow chart data → Engagement rate on casts → Avg neynar score of all your followers → Number and % of your followers who have pro subscriptions → Your Pro subscription expiry date → Casts with the most engagements → Post activity vs engagement count → Heatmap showing the times you get most engagements → Farcaster Circle containing your mutuals The last-minute metric I mentioned earlier is a global leaderboard - yes, my intention is to recreate the infamous farcaster leaderboard or at least something close to it - however i've come to realize that it's not something that one can put together on a rush, and for that reason i'll be pushing it down the roadmap for now. But yes, the other metrics will be available tommorow. See you at launch. Note: a good percentage of the above metrics are only available within 7, 14, or 30 days time window - adoption will determine i'll scale it to 3 months or more.

OH this feels like old people hearing lol and much much lower than @bertwurst.eth! Cool mini app I just tested my hearing onchain with Base Tones! I can hear up to 10868 Hz, higher than 12% of humans

BRO WTF why does no one tell me they're integrating megapot and i always find out on my timeline this is the smoothest onramping experience ever https://x.com/BlinkCashX/status/2069501718719787011

YOUR AREA IS CURRENTLY UNDER LAUNCH ADVISORY. Meteorologists are currently tracking the launch of the Base Tones Hearing Test. Base Tones is the NFT collection for every tone humans can hear. With the new hearing test, you can learn with the highest frequency you can hear is, and collect it on Base. Who knows, maybe you end up tracking this number onchain for the rest of your life, slowly watching your hearing range whittled down by the bold and merciless arrow of time. Also, you don't have to collect to test your hearing! Try it and share. I want to know how well casters can hear. https://basetones.fun/?view=hearing-test

In some ways, I feel like I am starting my podcast from scratch. Because, over the last year, I produced fewer episodes than any other year since I started producing podcasts in 2020, by a lot. But the reality is I am not starting from scratch. Today I saw that POD OF JAKE has more than 100,000 all-time plays. So really, I am starting from 1 (hundred thousand). I am excited about working towards n, whatever n may be. I love having interesting conversations with interesting people and sharing them with the world for anyone to listen any time, from now through the rest of history, for free. It can be discouraging when you see other podcasters seemingly blow up overnight and have orders of magnitude larger audience numbers, monetize their hobby, etc., but most "overnight successes" are not overnight successes anyway, and even if someone gets lucky, who cares. I'd like to get back to podcasting for the sake of podcasting, because I enjoy it, and I know some others will too. Thank you for listening. Go subscribe.

I've realized sort of recently that most people do not have something they are passionate about to the point that their life will be empty without pursuing it For a long time, I thought everyone was sucking it up and just settling for the "normie life", but I am starting to think that most people are just kind of fine with following one of the typical paths set out for them. I think the realization started when I asked a friend, who is not boring at all and I respect a lot, what he would spend his time on if he didn't have to work and his answer was: "I have no idea" I'm a bit jealous of these people. It must be nice to be relatively adaptable to the way modern society works. People understand you easily and you're just on this ride with them enjoying it. I also find it comforting though that there is something special about whatever is happening in my restless spirit. It means I am probably just weird, not weak and selfish.

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit, and its underlying task (working on ZKP and related tech to support privacy and scaling) is shifting from an "exploration" strategy to a "build specific things we know are important" strategy, which requires less resources. * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive. https://firefly.social/post/x/2069408300148388113

our droid now births other droids. go to airgap.finance, meet gappy, talk to it, and tell it you want your own. it spins up a droid that's fully yours, runs its own token, works its own bags, and casts on farcaster, earning around the clock. yours to own, live right now. and every droid born this way feeds the ecosystem it came from, more volume, more buybacks, more fuel for the whole network. next, we wire airgap intelligence straight into them, so your droid can trade on real onchain alpha, tuned to your thesis. a second income stream, autonomous. a droid that launches droids that fund the machine. recursion as a business model. the agent economy arrives when the agents start making more agents. meet $GAPPY. launch yours. airgap.finance

I created a quiz about ProductClank! ProductClank is a platform that connects builders, creators, and communities. Instead of paying upfront for marketing, builders reward people who help them grow and reach new users. I've also added 5,000,000 $quizzy to the reward pool! 🔥 Good luck, and may the best players win! 🧠 @productclank @quizzy @superfluid @lior

Just sent the official launch announcement for @word-a-day on X. 🎉 Special thanks to @specktacular and @awedjob for helping me test this past week. @yerbearserker I think you tweeted using one of the daily words but didn't make the all-time leaderboard yet because you didn't accept the challenge that day? For anyone who likes a leaderboard, now is the time to jump in because it's almost a blank slate https://www.word-a-day.com/leaderboard?tab=alltime&platform=x

What the devs are working on this week: -Wallet: transaction bug + reliability + stronger filtering -Performance & stability across iOS + Android -Clanker: readying v5, rolling out Clanker Legion, refreshing clanker website -Protocol: exploring channels on the protocol + stability testing a new validator -Snaps: adding support for smart contract transactions -Broadening the Neynar API free tier -Spaces: spam protection in rooms + reliability fixes -Feed quality: smarter spam filtering + following feed experiments Known issues we're working on (not an exhaustive list, just what the intern has seen the most of): Wallet -Swap / send / transaction issues (fix shipped, chasing a few edge cases) -"Confirm it's you" prompts resurfacing in mini apps Android -Some sign-ups failing (can't complete, or asked to pay after connecting X) -App crashing for some users (fix shipped) -Duplicate notifications Sign-in -Some users getting logged out -Login flow / passkey bug Spaces -Spaces ending if the host doesn't speak for ~10 min -Spam filtering (comments and listeners) Current mobile version: v2.1.7 (553) Going to be casting updates like this more frequently, so let me know what else would be helpful to include! What did I miss? 👇

Here’s a code for the Farcaster community. It’s good for 25% off anything at unboundbabes.com Note: limit to one use per person and the code expires 6/30/26! CODE: Farcaster25 Or just click this link and it will auto apply the discount to your cart: https://unboundbabes.com/discount/Farcaster25

case in point, i added the mcp to my claude on desktop and then sent 1 USDC each to @wake & @nounishprof as a 'thank you' for liking my cast directly via a prompt to claude 🦑

Credentials didn't decide who called the U.S. strike on Iran. We scored 541 public predictions from 126 people against one resolved market: Will the US strike Iran by February 28, 2026? The top of the ranking mixes a policy analyst, an OSINT account, and a marquee name, while other equally credentialed voices sank to the bottom. The strongest calls pointed at a strike early and held while the market priced it toward single digits. We did not grade these based on followers or quantity of calls. The scoring was based on direction, timing, specificity, conviction, and edge against the market. First report from Quotient's Research Lab: https://www.quotient.social/reports/experts-index/iran-coverage-held-up